Mortified

If you kept a journal or a diary during your formative years, and if you ever go back and look at it, then chances are you’ve shaken your head and/or shuddered at the thought of anyone ever reading what you once wrote.  I know that’s how I feel about my elementary school diaries, one of which is patterned with pastel-hued ballet shoes and the other a Ramona Quimby theme.  Luckily, I did not keep a diary in high school.  If I had, I would have burned it long ago to protect myself and anyone else who had the misfortune to come up in it.

{image via}

So imagine if you were ever asked to stand up in public, on a stage, and read passages from your very own personal stock of embarrassing entries.  Would you do it?  [My answer is no, after going back and reacquainting myself with my diaries.  A big, fat, resounding no!]  Well, plenty of people do.  And it’s one of the funniest things EVER.  It’s part of a show called Mortified.

A few weeks ago we went to this show at the Make-Out Room in the Mission.  It was, as mentioned above, a progression of 7 or 8 people getting up on stage, reading passages from their elementary or high school diaries, and occasionally providing some commentary on what they’d been going through when writing the entries.  For most of the participants, a photo of them from the time period of the entries was projected on a big screen behind them, allowing you to see what the person looked like when s/he put pen to paper.  And, as you’d expect, most of these photos were nerdy, awkward, or both.

It was THE FUNNIEST thing I’d seen in so long.  I have not laughed that much in eons.  It was just what I needed that night.

The entries that everyone chose were so hilarious on their own that the readers didn’t even have to work much on delivery.  The things they wrote were poignant, embarrassing, earnest, overly dramatic, and just plain funny.  One woman who had been a teenager in the early ‘70s had written about her friends who had started drinking alcohol, railing about their newfound addiction to “fools’ poison.”  A guy who had clearly been goth in high school and had the book of original poems to show for it had an entire poem dedicated to how he considered grey to be the only worthwhile color.  “Do not speak to me of pastels,” he wrote.  The show started with a girl reading entries from her freshman year bid to get on the marching band’s drum line (a cause close to my own heart), and the photo projected behind her depicted a completely geeky band nerd, in stark contrast to the striking woman on stage.

I admire anyone who can look back at herself and poke fun at the person she used to be.  That’s the other thing that makes this show great, I think.  While it’s beyond hilarious, there’s also this element of “I can read these entries and laugh about them and let you laugh about them too, because I’ve grown up into someone pretty awesome.”